2007-11-07 - 11:23 p.m.
You see, here in LA, it’s pretty much the end of the world. All right, perhaps not – but the writer’s strike is a huge deal. And for me, personally, well, I am as mad as one of the Eumenides about it. See how I work the Greek theatrical allusion in there? Clever, eh?
But I wish to run screeching onto the picket lines, grab the first Soloflex-toned, fluffy haired, super-liberal writer I see and dash his head onto the sidewalk until his brains flop out onto the ground. And then I wish to run into the Sony lot, pull out my enormous shlong, and urinate right on the head of the President of Production. What, aren’t our lives difficult enough without people holding a vanity strike?
With the writer’s strike, my income instantly and abruptly plummets 40 percent, overnight. Yes, it’s true, the amount of money I was making from script reading has already diminished to less and less – but I could still count on the spec scripts providing about six hundred or seven hundred bucks a month or so. And that’s money that is gone, at least for the indefinite future.
If the strike goes on until the middle of next year, god forbid, it seems likely that all the production companies whom I do reading for, most of whom are, I must confess, on the edge of their deals, will go belly up. You see, the joke is that both the writers and the producers WANTED this strike. And if both sides agree on something – that is, to strike – it’s going to happen. You don’t hear anyone saying that. But it’s true.
For instance, the writers want to strike, not just because of the public reasons we’ve been told – they’re fighting for an even break on DVD sales and on “new media.” As in 1988, they want to strike because they just want to show how fabulous and important they are. “Look at us! We can shut the city down! Hee hee hee! We are the kings! We are like Gods! Woo hoo! Woo hooo! Woo hooo-dee-hoo hoo!” they have been heard quacking on the picket lines.
The joke is, as happened in the last strike, it’s just so much crap. If a studio executive secretly calls some hungry writer and tells him to secretly submit a script, he is going to do it. Even if he has to cross a picket like – even if he has to stomp right over the heads of his strike captain’s little kiddies, crushing their skulls like egg shells.
A writer can no more refuse an offer to show off his work, than he can fly to the moon. It’s just going to be done sub rosa. Maybe the writer will submit the script with all the names changed. Maybe he will submit it under an alias. Maybe he will backdate the script so it will appear to have been submitted in early October or something. But you can bet the deals will still be done secretly and fully, leaving the front pickets to bluster and pompously orate about “solidarity” and “supporting the working man.” No such thing.
Meanwhile, the studios are privately delighted with the strike because it allows them to totally reorganize and streamline their business deals for the day when the strike ends. Before the strike started, the producers were all being quoted in the papers, noting, “Well, a strike would not be the worst thing in the world. It might actually give us a kick into investigating the new media forms, like online entertainment and video games, which union writers don’t play a part in.”
In addition, the strike also allows the producers to shut down and cancel all the “mercy fuck” production deals on the lot, such as those which finance all the companies that I am working for at the moment. At “Vanity Production Company,” a little production company that’s owned by the former, ousted president of Pathetica, you can expect everyone to be shown the door in a week or so and not to be invited back. The same is true at Pathetica itself, which will have no scripts at all and probably will return to business as a home video outlet.
Meanwhile, I had just gotten a phone call from a former executive at Megalith, who remembered me and wanted to use me as a reader for her new company, which was totally being funded by one of the big three TV networks. Now, according to Variety, we read that “all production companies funded by the TV networks have been shut down indefinitely.” So that will keep me eating tomato soup for another few months, I daresay.
Mind you, I am now doubly invested in getting out of the movie business entirely – which, if I admitted the truth, I am out of even now. I am going to ask for more shifts at the library and continue my scheme to get into the UCLA Library School for the Fall. But, really, it’s as though the world just wants to keep piling on ridiculous stuff on top of you until you are pulling a shopping cart and wearing a tin foil cap, I swear.
